


Scars

by MaverickWerewolf



Series: OCtober 2019 [2]
Category: A Shielding Thing, Original Work, Wulfgard
Genre: F/M, Romance, Scar Survey, Werewolf, fade to black before the smut, yeah maybe next time huh?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-09
Updated: 2019-10-09
Packaged: 2020-11-28 16:03:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,823
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20969261
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MaverickWerewolf/pseuds/MaverickWerewolf
Summary: Tom finds out taking a bath sure is hard - in a few more ways than one - when Vik gets curious about all his scars... and why he has some that should've killed him.





	Scars

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Tafferling](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tafferling/gifts).

> Written for a scar survey prompt. Vik (Sinvik) belongs to Taff.

You know what was great? Baths. _Baths _were great. All these upper-crust nobles took baths for granted, Tom was never going to take a bath for granted in his whole life. Especially not ones that were warm and had _bubbles _and smelled like lavender and… and – wait, that was Vik.

Vik was something else he’d never take for granted.

Vik – _Sin_vik, but to Tom she was Vik – Shielding, who slinked quietly into the room right behind him, gently pushing the door up and generally acting like a cat who thought nobody had noticed her yet. Not that Vik didn’t usually act at least a little cattish, if you asked Tom.

“Hi, Vik,” he said without turning around, as he almost pointedly – no, definitely pointedly – unbuckled the straps of his breastplate and pulled it off, hanging it from the armor stand in front of him.

“Hello, Tom,” she said, her scent getting even stronger and getting cozy with his back now, as a pair of deft hands slid around to his front and started undoing the latches of his sleeveless jerkin.

Tom tilted his head back over his shoulder to look at – down – _there _she was, gods she was so adorable, and he didn’t care if she could figure out he’d thought that somehow or however that worked.

He grinned. “You just couldn’t wait to see me naked again, huh?”

Vik hummed a not-negative, as in probably positive as in she _definitely _had wanted to see him naked again, sound – he was _very _good at figuring her out, thank you – and moved around to his front to finish opening that jerkin up. Tom went ahead and helped her out by shrugging out of it and letting it drop onto the floor behind him, where he figured it’d better get comfortable, since it was staying there for a while. This bath just got longer.

Oh yeah, a lot longer. _Heheh__… Okay, Dragon, seriously._

While Tom let his mind busily gallop off to the gutter, though, Vik actually seemed a little preoccupied by something else. Somehow. For some reason.

She cocked her head to one side all funny – in a different kind of way than he did; what? He couldn’t really put his finger on it – and reached up to touch a scar running about half the length of his left biceps.

“For a swordsman and berserker and whatnot,” she said, quirking a brow while she was at it, “you don’t have many scars.”

A corner of his lips pulled up in half a grin before he could even realize it, and also before he gave it any thought at all, he blurted the same thing he said to everybody else who told him that.

“I’m too good at what I do.”

Vik’s eyes flicked over to his face, looking _knowing_ like they always did, and her finger on his scar tapped it gently once or twice.

“That’s half true,” she sort of mused aloud, “but what’s the other half?”

She was way too good at this whole reading people thing.

“The, ah… other half,” Tom said slowly, watching as her eyes traced a few more scars over his skin, counting them maybe, and now and then her finger followed after, the light touch of her skin raising the hairs on the back of his neck. Starting to raise some other things, too, especially with her scent absolutely filling his nose right now _but anyway_—

“You were saying?” Vik prompted coyly. “All the fighting, the clumsiness…”

_Waitwhat_.

“Hey now. Vik, please, I am _not _clumsy.”

“Are too.”

She smirked, and that seemed to be about the end of it, since she reached down, took his wrist, and lifted his hand up to get a look at any scars that were on there. Which there was one, right one the back of his hand – and matching on his palm. Now _that _had been an ouch.

“I, ah… I don’t scar easy,” he finally finished when his brain caught up in-between the _she just called you clumsy, Dragon _and the _oh man she smells so amazing, why do we still have pants on?_

He was trying to be nice, that was why. See? He could be nice.

For a little while longer, anyway.

“Mmhm. Then how’d you get these?”

Breath. All warm and all Vik, washing right down his front and trying to tickle his stomach. Couldn’t stand it. Mind. Gutter. Pants that _really _needed to come off.

“Uhh…”

“Tom. Focus.”

“Huh?”

She was _so _amused, even he could tell. “Scars.”

“Oh – yeah. Silver, mostly, I guess. Silver _sucks_. It hurts more than… almost anything. Makes me bleed a lot, burns, feels like hellfire, and then I don’t heal from it. Not _right_, anyway. I guess I heal from silver more like everybody else heals from everything else, or something. That’s what Surandil said, anyway.”

“Seems you been hit by silver a lot.”

“Now and then. I got a nice silver scar on my leg, you should see _that _one—”

While he went ahead and let one hand wander down to his belt and unbuckle it, though, Vik was still playing all coy and… Or not so much, all of a sudden. The look on her face changed. Her scent changed, too, in those subtle little ways he’d learned to pick up on from everybody, but especially from her.

Tom followed her eyes to his chest. His heart, actually, and to the big ugly scar right over his heart that looked almost like X marking the spot, if you had a really weird and sometimes kind of sick sense of humor –which he was here to provide at all times of the day.

She didn’t have to ask a question or point anything out. All she did was furrow her brow, frown, and lay her fingers over a portion of the old wound while her eyes went up to his and, without a word, asked him a lot of things.

That look on her face of all those mixed-up feelings – confusion, surprise, and maybe just a whole lot of profound curiosity – actually hooked Tom’s mind and brought it up from something other than various impatient feelings regarding the state of his trousers. For now, anyway.

“Yeah, it should have,” he said. Then swallowed, realizing she’d never technically said, _Shouldn__’t this have killed you? _So he added, “Technically I guess it kinda did.”

Vik just kept staring at him. When he didn’t say anything else in a timely manner, she prompted, “What’s that mean?”

“It’s, ah… it’s— that should’ve killed me, but – it didn’t. It couldn’t. It was just a spear.”

Now she really _was _interested – and struggling to make sense of it. “Spears kill plenty of people, Tom. More people probably die to spears in your world than swords.”

“Uh-huh, okay, true, but this wasn’t a silver spear. It was a normal spear, like for killing – humans. Not monsters.” He swallowed. “Not werewolves. Even things that’d kill anybody else, I’ll heal from. This would’ve killed me, yeah, but I’m a werewolf, so… I just – came back.”

He reached up and took her wrist. Sure, he’d had plans earlier of guiding that hand down to the scar on his waist, but right now, all he did was hold on.

Memories came flooding in, ones he didn’t really want to remember, especially not right now. Pain. Fear. Seeing the long shaft of a spear sticking right up out of his own chest. Not being able to breathe. Hearing voices – Caiden, Kye – people trying to help him. He didn’t remember all the things he said before he’d… Died. Sort of died. Right there with a spear impaling his heart, a heart that refused to give up, even when it had every single right to.

And then when he’d woken up later…

“But wounds like that leave scars,” Tom finished, not meaning for his voice to fall as low as it did. “Wounds that kill men, that were supposed to kill _me_. And would have, if I wasn’t…”

If he wasn’t _what?_ Bound by fate? Cursed the day he was born? What did he want to say here, exactly? _If I wasn__’t such a monster?_

When he found his voice again, he said, “That wasn’t the only time that happened, either. The one up there?” he flicked his eyes up, in the general direction of up and left, which got Vik to set her eyes right on the big, angry scar that cut up into his hairline. “Everybody told me I was lucky I didn’t die, when I got that one. That was before any of us _knew_. So… maybe it wasn’t luck. Maybe it was just the opposite.”

Vik looked up into his eyes, and Tom froze. She was the only person who could really do that. Everybody else who looked at him? They at least got afraid. Vik did, too, but not in the same way. She just embraced that fear that something in his eyes worked up into everybody’s souls – yeah, even hers. All she did was stare right back.

“You call me a cat,” she said, something teasing slowly padding its way back into her tone, while a warm touch tried reaching out and touching far deeper than the skin of his chest – reaching out from her, from her soul, to touch his heart. “Yet here you are, a wolf with a good nine or more lives.”

In spite of that warmth she tried to give him, a quick shiver ran up Tom’s spine. Not because he was cold, though. Exactly the opposite.

All the bad feelings, all the terrible thoughts, seemed to get chased away at once. Here, her skin against his, taking another deep breath of her scent, and looking into her eyes – yeah. It all left. Everything from before came back instead.

You know, from when his mind was in the gutter?

A grin tugged at his lips, made him show those big white sharp fangs that never really went away and made him think stupid shit like _all the better to eat you with. _Like right now.

So he leaned down, planted a firm and not exactly precise kiss on her lips, nose bumping into hers. He slid his hands down her sides. Under her thighs, lifting her up, putting those legs around his waist as he stepped one foot over into the tub, carrying her with him.

Vik got one arm around his neck, one around his middle, fingers digging into the short spikes of his hair – while he nuzzled at her face, kept kissing her, a growl in his chest chewing up whatever was left of air between the two of them. Loud, rumbling, and very, very hungry, and he was _so _proud of himself for holding back this long.

And hey, the water was still warm. Or maybe he was just so hot it didn’t make any difference.


End file.
